Mammals, I Think We Are Called — Giselle Leeb
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SALT PUBLISHING 2022
My previous reviews of —
Giselle Leeb: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/giselle-leeb/
Salt Publishing: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/salt-publishing/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
The Goldfinch Is Fine
“The weatherman is expecting a question, but Lars takes him firmly by the elbow and steers him towards the cafeteria.”
…which elbow moment prefigures the eventual love moments ending of this exquisitely oblique story of the otherwise, I think, nameless TV weatherman, and his plotting of ‘connecting red lines untethered from his neatly drawn triangle.’ The configuration, indeed, of wave coordinates while ‘the new natural’ meets ‘the new normal’ — and the kids next door effectively become his? However, the most memorably poignant concept relates to his obsession in watching a permanent ‘live’ webcast of a non-gold goldfinch in its lair that is susceptible to all the freak waves and hurricanes and movements of ice floes, a goldfinch that turns out to be… no, I can’t tell you for fear of plotting spoilers.
Mammals, I Think We Are Called
“…each with a neat title, like that Bob Dylan video where he discards the lyrics once he’s sung them.”
As part of a writer’s retreat of 12 (writing disciples?) in the countryside with an erratic tutor, wine involved, box on the hill, words being thrown to us like Dylan’s cards here become magical shape-shifting semantics, through the eyes of the defiant narrator, as they write little creative essays to become one whole in my mind, essays, literally, of itemised animals (one a mandrill), each potentially ‘were-’ if not weird like Kafka. Jugged hare et al. Still cohering as a whole even as I write this about it. Both a satire and a heartfelt prose-poetic truth. Eyes staring from Noah’s Ark? Alice’s hare followed into dreamland?
“The hare would like to be bigger, it would like to be very big. Even though it is bigger than rabbits, it is still too small.”
I previously reviewed the next story here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/12/07/black-static-66/#comment-14527, as follows…
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EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT PLACE by Giselle Leeb
“, twisting and turning in the hot, tight sleeping bag,…”
A remarkable vision of a nostalgia of a nostalgia, where a cyborg-human revisits the bland civilised mœurs of a 2018 country holiday campsite with ping pong table, neat borders and convenient conveniences, a place where we ‘pure humans’ once played at living. I dare not even adumbrate where this singular tourist’s journey with a ticket for such an experience takes you, for fear you will recognise your own future for what it once was, as you adjust your detachable eye (or “I”?) to look better through Sheil’s earlier crack or hole in the wall at your next door neighbours for real. Everybody knows that place. As you follow.
AS YOU FOLLOW
“past the silent dome of St Paul’s”
As the only way to convey this story other than by your reading it, I shall say it seems to be an apotheosis of an apotheosis of sociable drinking excitement in what turns out not to be a noisily heaving German beer cellar on Halloween night but a similar venue near the Thames where a boy-man once called, I infer, John Bello, as a cherub upon the stone cathedral straddling the river itself, until . . . I shake off such a wayward daydream and finish this unbelievably wild story as an oxymoron of poignant sparkling as it unfolds the rest of itself that I follow without further diversion nor knowledge eventually of its later latent spoiler.
DROWNING
“It was all mere moments in time.”
As you follow, this is sort of tied in with the imputed drowning of woman in tandem with boy-man in previous story above, here the boy-man lives on in his own numinous state remembering their longings in the city now playing out on their sheep farm with hidden inland sea, under highly poetic African skies and amid African fairy rings with memories of her slow, Zeno’s Paradox moribund dying till imperceptibly gone in the death, if not passion, of the reading moment. I can hardly breathe, let alone make sufficient record of what I have just seemed to read.
“He imagines a hand pecked through with red.”
This review will be continued in the New Year.
THIN
Most feel fatter after the fattening season just gone for which I set aside, by happenstance, an interval, only now to be thawed out by reversed cryogenics as a refrain of NOT THIN if not NOTHINg, as THINks I the massive mammal reader now with a new self body-image fighting off the burden of Biblical and historic events, such as famine and war… a sense of an Evenson warren of cells somehow eventually leading, cell by cell, to a LEEBerty of self?
My ageing brain has just twigged that I first reviewed AS YOU FOLLOW in February 2018, here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/02/17/best-british-short-stories-2017/, in its then context, as follows….
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As You Follow
GISELLE LEEB
“as a group of men stand and they are going drink, drink, drink,”
“And him, him, him, he points.”
This, for me, is an amazing dark but somehow equally undark piece of work. A coruscant vision of a theme bar in London where Mario Lanza songs becomes German. Lederhosen and beer steins. Men drinking. Bouncers. And one elfish boy. I imagine him sometimes like one of the impish birds in the previous story and the narrator watching him a twitcher or a rubber-necker in the first story. I can later imagine the drink sparklers transferring to the body of water…
“, past the silent dome of St Paul’s, down to the river, to the mighty Thames.”
SCAFFOLDING
A story from the edges inward, a brush with Scurvy as eventually recurrent healing and breaking of skin wounds, something bone-deep or biography-deep, as doctor and patient work in a mutually subsuming synergy against the latter form of psychotherapeutic depth. Seems too thin for THIN as well as for someone urged to put a buffer of ever-refestering fat upon their bones?
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“Hey now, none of that. You know I don’t have one evil bone in my body. Only two hundred and six of them?”
— Becca Fitzpatrick
I Probably Am a Lonely One
(inspired by Nighthawks by Edward Hopper)
“Let’s be lonely together –“
This is an amazing lightning ball of a story in my life stemming from an extrapolation of the thoughts of the people in the famous Hopper. As if reconstituted by a new hopper machine not for refuse but for acceptance. (My daughter and I have been collaborating on various stories in recent months – a still ongoing process and as yet unpublished – one completed story being entitled CHIAROSCURO and featuring a feel for Hopper paintings.)
Wolphinia
“– you never know what to expect from humans. […] What did the tiny government ever do for us?”
Just feed them fishy soo-nak, I say! Tiny enough for you? This is one whole crazeee fable-with-a-transamphibian-moral! — deploying MPs in a government bunker, mercury poisoning, kamikaze cars flying into the harbour, and, of course, the wondrous wolphins. It all makes a climactic sense as I drove off its end. I just felt sorry for the one who told me about it, although I gather it was a happy ending for her after I’d finished reading it. And hopefully for the globe itself. My legs have all gone stubby, though.
A, and I
“There should be a sliding scale of emoji stickers for glumness – ending in death.”
This is a tantalisingly puckish unofficial diary or real-time review with a spoilt-for-choice amount of mood-emojis provided for the subject’s official doctored diary, under a disarming Psych-tutelage, depicting a chatty battle nattered to us about the I-subjects’s emotional projection or repression, involving an AI robot and an archetypically loveable kitten, and viral I-tubing.
“Why didn’t evolution discourage feeling mammals from being unwittingly attracted to robots?”
Are You Cold, Monkey?
Are You Cold?
“There does not seem to be a connection.”
I was mesmerised and tantalised by the wire and cloth hung incantatory refrains of many things in plain spoken poetry, prose without enjambment, these things including dreams needing to be nice, a mother, a monkey learning words like ‘cold’ as it is today for the first time from the protagonistic little girl herself who lies in a puddle, plus a Prof and a God.
Still am.
Dividual
“Yes, I admit I was a prisoner. A minor crime against F—— b——, in case you’re asking.”
This is what I might once have called Covidual, rather than Dividual, but I see the point re this study in identity. What lockdown does and what it can reveal about your health especially when subject to examination under such ready-made solitary-confinement, with quack and not-so-quack medical remedies, cruelty-to-be-kind et al, mirrors and old-fashioned Wagon Wheels as a sort of reward psychotherapy, in search of the self versus the selfie. And we now all need to be doctors for ourselves! To remove the illusion from the genuine deduction achieved by randomness?
“The two-storey-high, neon F—— b—— v103 logo lies on its side.”
Grow Your Gorilla
“I imagine plastic being spun into fur; I imagine forests that only the true and the brave can enter.”
A story of a child and a ‘toy’ gorilla, only one of which that will grow into a full silverback among many such ‘toys’ given to other children as a sort of craze, and a sudden mass movement somehow broadly in tune with the timely inverse ‘tontine’ poignancy that the current Post Office scandal possesses on this very day I have read it. Indeed, this is one of those rare stories it is a privilege to read, and while the concertina of chances in your life that brought it to the attention of your reading eyes is inscrutable, you simply know you will remember it forever, having now read it. Another example is Flannery O’Connor’s utterly different story called ‘Enoch and the Gorilla’. But both stories depend on the reader’s kindness in synergy with them.
THE EDGES OF SEASONS
“Whatever happened to instinct?”
This is an intensely yearning story of someone in an adopted country, feeling unwelcome, and a myth of girl-swan and an iced over lake, leading, not leda-ing, to what I infer to be a black man’s poetic apotheosis of a stripped self with the swan’s self and a flight south, as finally triggered by elbows…
“I push the bucket in front of me and use my elbows to propel myself forward.”
“‘We are all the same inside,’…”
Pain Is a Liar
“The coterie is always telling him that he is full of side effects, that he is just one of the herd.”
This is where the common herd is experimented upon for their immunity to pain, rather than to the plague, to lessen its effects on others known as the coterie, as was half-attempted once perhaps before or after this story was written. It is another haunting incantatory work that works through prose refrains, whether real or inferred refrains, but they never do actually refrain. Anton, one of the herd, is helped to be stoical by some others in suffering such applied pain to his body by hammer et al. Are these helpful others all part of some devious plan unaware that only the ‘coterie’ itself has ‘erotic’ embedded in its name as a primary impulse? Those giving pain lie, too, especially to themselves.
Click the star…
From ‘herd’ immunity to the coterie of shepherds…
When Death Is Over
“The lift is slow and almost stops a couple of times. I say a little prayer to a god I don’t believe in and it keeps going.”
…and that seems to sum up this provocatively thoughtful and haunting story of a block of apartments as blocked by labelled debris below and the windows upstairs blocked by similar debris within, and some tenants sing as a choice of ‘Shepherds’ below outside in cloaks, whilst the Sapphic couple of which the narrator is one copes with the ‘myth’ of the falling man, as a redemption for us all, when in fact it is the other tenants falling deliberately? To your scattered bodies go? Or an ultimate faith in El Eb or in El Bowie himself?
“I turn back to the window and rest my elbows on the sill, my head in my hands.
Just darkness out there.”
HOOKED
“It made no sense and it made some sense.”
This effulgent story made complete sense to me. Not a Banksy, not even a cruel Damien Hirst, the giant fish on a crane hook over London casting rainbow trails for a particular woman was a miracle, not a coelacanth, but something blended from the supposed ‘falling man’ as Ichthys in the previous story above and, elsewhere, John Cowper Powys’ unforgettable question ‘IS IT A TENCH?’ as a Glistenberry Romance.
BARLEYCORN
“…but somehow understanding is no longer the point.”
“…a wild and hairy man who bursts from a wood and chases after her, angry she is writing something he doesn’t understand.”
This is a time where a ‘physical newspaper’ is rare, and we see that this book’s erstwhile ‘grow a gorilla’ vision is becoming a pandemic of hairiness. The quandary resides in the barleycorn and accident to a the man remembered by a pathologist who now depends on his husband’s approval and in the fact that all parts tend to reach out towards a destined whole, i.e. here in his morgue workplace that is, for me, far more positive than Frankenstein’s so-called workshop of filthy creation … in this Leeb story that means far more than it seems to otherwise mean.
“The student rereads her concluding chapter for the tenth – eleventh? – time. The arguments are all there but somehow unconvincing, as if they add up to less than their parts.”
A quandary that is finally dispersed, as I hope I have now helped bring the whole together, by finding an already planted added-value in each and every part.
This story is fine substantive culmination to this book where a man’s pondered-about ‘sickie’ from work as a pathologist becomes a ‘sickle’ in the hand eventually enabling him to cross paths with the female student writing a thesis about climate change who stands often on what I would call her perceived Last Balcony, a place eventually becoming, in the end “balconies, spreading, connecting,…” A coda’s phrase that seems to help justify all I have found myself working towards in my writerly endeavours and a phrase, too, that is, in hindsight, retrospectively seeded throughout this whole highly visionary Leeb book, one that I have had the privilege and good luck (or preternatural instinct?) to be destined to choose to read and review.
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BarleyCorn – BalCony